Splitting this out from another thread where someone was interested in subscribing to dashboards (e.g. Emailed version).

My comments were as follows:

Most dashboards are quite large in my experience and are not easily printed, exported, saved and certainly would be too large to drop to excel and email.

However, a carefully constructed dashboard gives you the ability to create what would be a custom report in any ERP system. More structured than a single chart or grid, but not overwhelmingly big.

Essentially I think the main use would be from making a simple A4 formatted report containing a handful of graphs, tables or gauges (think of a simple company overview - current stock level, current sales vs budget, 10 biggest orders yesterday etc as a one page view of yesterdays performance).

I made such a report in SSRS in my last company and while you could access it on the report server, it worked much better delivered to the users inbox as you naturally would open it and read it.

The trouble Phocas will have is how to restrict what dashboard would be email-able and what wouldn’t as too much and it’ll look garbage.

Just thinking about this. Perhaps we could have a different dashboard mode? Probably blue sky thinking here

On screen Dashboard - The design we currently use.Print out dashboard - Works similar to print layout in Excel. If you are a designer would have a dotted line area showing you the confines of the page layout. This dashboard would be a PRINT only version, so would not adaptability adjust on screen size.